Tag Archives: Shaltari

The battle report for my first ever game of Dropzone Commander is now available online. We played a four-player game at 1,000 points each, and there were two Shaltari armies, one Posthuman Republic, and one United Colonies of Mankind. The mission type was Recon, which placed Intelligence points within each building and on each hill, and the goal was to grab as many as we possibly could.

I had a very gaming birthday this year, as not only did my awesome fiancé get me a tonne of Magic cards, he also presented me with a Premium Shaltari Mega Army complete with aluminium case. As I had a 1,000 point game planned to occur over the weekend it was time to get a wiggle on and start putting these babies together!

Not having the time to assemble everything, I decided on my army list first, then only worked on the items I needed for yesterday’s game.

The Braves were ridiculously easy to put together. Snipping them off their sprues was a bit heavy on the clippers, because the sprues were thick and these are the only metal minis in the whole army, but the figures themselves required zero clean-up. The bases had some minor flash and sprue that needed quick pruning.

Spirit gates were more fiddly, but still assembled in a matter of minutes. Some light cleanup with a knife was required, but it was absolutely minimal effort compared to your average Citadel model.

The Eden gates took the most time, largely because some of the resin was slightly warped and needed resetting with hot water. There was a lot of flash that needed scraping away, but this was easy peasy. The main problem was that the tips of the struts were merged in to the sprue joints so much that it was impossible to see where the struts ended and sprue began. As a consequence I cut too much off, and had to go digging among my offcuts to find the matching part, glue it back together, recut it in the right place, prune it down to the right shape, then assemble the gate.

Once I’d done this with one gate, though, I knew what to look out for in the remaining two.

The Coyote and Ocelot were joys to assemble. I really love these little walkers and definitely think they’re the most appealing models in the army.

All in all I assembled:

Six Braves stands

One Haven gate

Three Tomahawks

Two Yari with Microwave guns

Two Spirit gates

Three Eden gates

Two Warspears

One Coyote

One Ocelot

in the space of two and a half hours, and that’s including time to rectify my snipping error, and be excruciatingly anal about flash-pruning. An entire playable army, ready to roll the same afternoon. The resin’s even a fairly bright white-grey colour, so I didn’t feel quite so bad about playing unpainted minis.

The only thing to be wary of is how soft resin is compared to plastic. If you’re used to carving away at a mini to get it to where you want, you’re going to slice up your resin like a serial killer. Be gentle; that’s all it takes.

There’s a new kid on the wargames block, and he’s kicking over the chairs and scribbling his name on the walls: DropZone Commander. Well, it might not be quite like that, but what it is doing is giving us a great new game for which you can buy all you will ever need for £265.

Don’t adjust your eyes. You didn’t misread that. Of course, someone’s going to have to pop £15 on the rulebook, too, but that’s it.

The minis are incredible. At 10mm scale you might worry that things are going to get clunky, but Dave Lewis of Hawk Wargames has done an amazing job. Vehicles were sculpted digitally, and are so detailed that tanks have tiny moveable parts. Troops were done the old-fashioned way – by hand – and yet these absolutely miniscule figures are superb (and too small for my 50mm macro lens to get a fix on).

It’s called DropZone Commander with good reason: The scale may be 10mm, but your battlefield is, for medium-sized games, 48X48mm. That’s only two feet shorter than your average 40K table, and your troops are not going to run their little legs off crossing all that on their own. Even wheeled / tracked vehicles are sitting out in the open for too long. No, you’re going to need to airlift your army into position with Dropships, or they aren’t going to make it.

We’ve used books for buildings in this game: Dropships in flight are measured as being 6″ from the table surface, so it’s important to know how tall your structures are. But DZC tactics can also rely heavily on destroying buildings, so books gave us the ability to remove layers and leave the foundations in place. Hawk Wargames has – for free, mind you – gorgeous buildings that you can download from their website and print onto stiff card.

Yes, again! I’m not having a seizure, I’m not making this up! A games company which gives you free support from its website, and even encourages fan-made extras! Stick with me on this one.

The armies from this particular game were the United Colonies of Mankind (UCM), and PostHuman Republic (PHR). There are currently four armies in total: The UCM are the remains of the once-great Human empire; the PHR split off and are now cyborgs; the Scourge are body-thieving parasites; and the Shaltari are ancient and advanced aliens. Flavour-wise the UCM are sorta kinda Imperial Guard-ish, the PHR are a bit Tau-ish, the Scourge are Tyranid-like, and the Shaltari are vaguely Eldar. Play-styles, though, are entirely different.

The obligatory size comparison shows a Tactical Marine between a PHR Janus Scout Walker, the smallest Walker the PHR have, and a PHR Neptune Medium Dropship.

I like it. I like it so much that I’m picking up a Premium Shaltari Mega Army in the next few weeks. In fact, I’ve been terribly cheeky and asked Mr. Troo if I can have it for my birthday. So you can expect to see a lot more of DZC on this blog over the coming months (or years).